Overview
- The Nature study, published Wednesday, delivers the first 3D, whole-brain map of how astrocytes connect across the mouse brain.
- The maps reveal long-range links, including cross-hemisphere paths, and show that these support-cell networks can reshape after sensory loss.
- Researchers used a harmless virus to drop tracing tags into astrocytes, labeled molecules as they moved through gap junctions, then cleared whole brains to image tagged cells in 3D across many mice.
- In mice engineered without astrocyte gap junctions, the mapped connections largely disappeared, indicating the pathways rely on these tiny channels between neighboring cells.
- The team built the tracing-and-clearing pipeline to be low-cost and reproducible for other labs, and they plan to track which molecules move through these networks and test disease models, with human network patterns still unknown.